I bought a cheap micro-B-USB-to-normal-USB-receptacle adapter for my Android tablet, so now I can enjoy the peculiar experience of using a tablet with a mouse. Surprisingly, it supports it “out of the box” – no extra software is necessary and a little mouse pointer just appears on the screen. I guess my keyboard will work, too. Surprisingly, the adapter also apparently allows me to use normal USB flash drives, too. The only problem is that this version of Android limits write access to external storage.

I’ve migrated my netbook’s Ubuntu installation to Xubuntu. The main reason is that Unity requires 3D acceleration that my netbook’s Intel card could not provide, so everything ran with software rendering. This wasn’t a major problem, but if I want a shiny-but-sluggish OS I could boot Windows (literally – the netbook came pre-installed with Windows 7).

I did it without reinstalling from scratch, just by installing/removing packages. So far it seems to work, but hunting down the last remnants of Unity and Gnome will take some time.

There’s about zero interest in the Joystick plug-in, so that’s on hold for now, unless as an outlet for my own amusement (an learning git). People seem to be interested in gamepads only as a means for telescope control, which is out of the project scope. (For a start, because the Telescope Control plug-in doesn’t support “pulse guiding” anyway.) I didn’t publicize the project well, anyway – a single forum thread is not quite “known far and wide”.

There are a number of things I am supposed to be doing on Stellarium, but life and relatives interfered. (This Sunday is Easter in Bulgaria.) An incomplete list:

Cleanup/rewrite of the Satellites plug-in for better handling of updates, adding/removing satellites, handling magnitude data and the “realistic mode” simulation and infrastructure for easier transition to alternative GUIs. Oh, and fixing some outstanding bugs.

The location-dependent time-zone feature, which involves cleanup of the delta-T code, which involves a rewrite of the delta-T calculation methods handling. Only the last last part is partially done.

The Joystick plug-in prompted me to look at the Text User Interface plug-in (as a potential joystick-friendly menu). Let’s just say that some parts of it need a smarter implementation…

I need to copy-edit a lot of the strings added in the development version. English is not the first language of most active developers, and it shows.

At this stage of development:
– the plug-in supports only one controlling device. If there are more than one
connected to the system, it will pick the first indexed by SDL.
– all controls are hard-coded. Customization is planned for the future.

Joystick controls:
– the first two axes are assumed to be the X and Y axes and pan the view
– the third axis (throttle? yaw?), if present, controls zoom
– any hat switches, if present, pan the view
– button 1 (trigger?) toggles the mount mode (between alt-azimuth and
equatorial)
– holding down button 2 allows finer movement when panning and zooming,
similar to holding down SHIFT when using the keyboard.

Gamepad controlls:
– the left analog stick (if present) pans the view
– vertical axis of the right analog stick (if present) controls zoom
– direction buttons pan the view
– the button quartet on the right side:
+ the bottom button (X-cross or A) toggles the mount mode
+ holding down the right button (Circle or B) allows finer movement
+ the left button (Square or X) returns to the default zoom
+ the top bottom (Triangle or Y) returns to the current time, which is
necessary, because…
– the left shoulder button slows down time, the right one speeds it up

The only project there so far is a work in progress: a plug-in that will allow controlling Stellarium with a joystick or gamepad instead of a mouse. (Of course, you’ll still need a keyboard if you want to use all the hotkeys, unless you have one of those exotic gamepads with a full QWERTY keyboard.)

Since it introduces an external dependency (on SDL, for multi-platform joystick support), I’ve decided to implement it as a dynamic plug-in distributed separately from Stellarium. As a side effect, this may result in changes that will make dynamic plug-in development easier, such as creating a “development package” for Stellarium (a “stellarium-dev” for those familiar with Unix naming schemes).

Since this adds more to my already well-padded Stellarium work list, don’t expect miracles. After the initial enthusiasm abates, I’ll treat it as a task to turn to when I get stuck somewhere else. (On a second thought, I treat all my Stellarium tasks that way, so it won’t be an exception.)